In the ear­ly morn­ing hours of Mon­day, Feb­ru­ary 11, 1963, Sylvia Plath brought food and drink into the bed­room of her two sleep­ing young chil­dren. She opened a win­dow in their room and attached a note with her doc­tor’s name and phone num­ber to a baby car­riage in the hall­way. She then went into the kitchen and sealed it off with tape and wet tow­els. She turned on the gas and put her head into the oven.

It was a sad end­ing for a woman who had strug­gled for much of her life with men­tal ill­ness. She was 30 years old. But with the crit­i­cal and pop­u­lar suc­cess of Ariel, the posthu­mous­ly pub­lished col­lec­tion of poems writ­ten dur­ing the last months of her life, Plath’s sui­cide became one of the most mythol­o­gized events in the his­to­ry of 20th cen­tu­ry let­ters. The grim event of 50 years ago is inex­tri­ca­bly bound up with Plath’s lega­cy as a poet.

In recog­ni­tion of that fact, we mark the anniver­sary with a record­ing Plath made at the BBC stu­dios in Decem­ber, 1962, of one of her most cel­e­brat­ed poems–one she had only recent­ly writ­ten, called “Lady Lazarus.” The ver­sion Plath reads con­tains two lines that were cut from the pub­lished poem. (You can open the text in a new win­dow to read while you lis­ten.) “Lady Lazarus” is a dis­turb­ing poem, with imagery from the Holo­caust graft­ed onto personal–one might say narcissistic–revelations of sui­ci­dal obses­sion. The sin­is­ter, malev­o­lent tone is espe­cial­ly chill­ing when you hear it in Plath’s own voice:

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

For more on Plath’s life and her com­pli­cat­ed and con­tentious lit­er­ary lega­cy, and to hear anoth­er of her read­ings, see our Octo­ber 27, 2012 post, “For Sylvia Plath’s 80th Birth­day, Hear Her Read ‘A Birth­day Present.’ ”

Many a writer has said they write to save their lives. And many a writer has died by sui­cide. In few cas­es has the con­nec­tion been so direct as in that of the poet Anne Sex­ton. Encour­aged in 1957 by her ther­a­pist to write poet­ry to stave off her sui­ci­dal ideation, she even­tu­al­ly joined a group of mid-cen­tu­ry “con­fes­sion­al” poets based in Boston—including Robert Low­ell and Sylvia Plath—whose per­son­al pathos, fam­i­ly pain, and severe bouts of depres­sion pro­vid­ed much of the mate­r­i­al for their work. Despite Sexton’s tremen­dous career suc­cess at what began, more-or-less, as a hob­by, she became over­whelmed by her ill­ness and com­mit­ted sui­cide in 1974.

There are those who wish to debate whether so-called “con­fes­sion­al poets” were tru­ly tor­ment­ed indi­vid­u­als or navel-gaz­ing nar­cis­sists. This seems fair enough giv­en the will­ing self-expo­sure of poets like Plath, Low­ell, and Sex­ton, but it kind of miss­es the point; their loss­es and trans­gres­sions were as real, or not, as anyone’s, but we remem­ber them, or should, for their writ­ing. Instead I find it inter­est­ing to see their pub­lic selves as per­for­mances, what­ev­er the auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal con­nec­tions in the work. A for­mer fash­ion mod­el, Anne Sex­ton was par­tic­u­lar­ly adept at self-pre­sen­ta­tion, and as her fame as a writer increased—she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1966 and a suc­ces­sion of grants and awards through­out the sixties—her poet­ry became less focused on the strict­ly per­son­al, more on the cul­tur­al (she has become well-known, for exam­ple, for a sar­don­ic, fem­i­nist per­spec­tive in such poems as “Snow White and the Sev­en Dwarfs”). A good deal of her work was pure inven­tion, despite the illu­sion of inti­ma­cy.

Nonethe­less, the short, 1966 film “Anne Sex­ton at Home” (top, with Span­ish sub­ti­tles, con­tin­ued below) lets us engage in some voyeurism. It begins with Sexton’s irri­ta­tion, as she’s inter­rupt­ed by the dog. Then the film cuts away, the scene has changed, and she frankly acknowl­edges the poet’s voice as a “per­sona” (from the Greek for mask); her poems are “mon­sters,” into which she has “pro­ject­ed her­self.” When we cut back again to the first scene, Sex­ton con­fi­dent­ly reads her “Men­stru­a­tion at Forty.” And we cut away again, and Sex­ton, her famil­iar cig­a­rette nev­er far away, riffs on “fam­i­ly & poet­ry” as her hus­band Alfred tries to avoid the cam­era. We see the poet with her daugh­ter, their inter­ac­tions play­ful (and also a lit­tle dis­turb­ing). Through­out it all Sex­ton per­forms, seem­ing­ly pleased and enjoy­ing the camera’s atten­tion.

In the last part of “Anne Sex­ton at Home” (above), the poet reads per­haps her most explic­it work about her many sui­cide attempts, “Want­i­ng to Die.” In a brief intro­duc­tion, she says, “I can explain sex in a minute, but death, I can’t explain.” But the play­ful­ness drains from her demeanor, as she comes to the final two stan­zas:

Bal­anced there, sui­cides some­times meet,
rag­ing at the fruit, a pumped-up moon,
leav­ing the bread they mis­took for a kiss,

leav­ing the page of the book care­less­ly open,
some­thing unsaid, the phone off the hook
and the love, what­ev­er it was, an infec­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent

For Sylvia Plath’s 80th Birth­day, Hear Her Read ‘A Birth­day Present’

Josh Jones is a writer, edi­tor, and musi­cian. Fol­low him @jdmagness